ABSTRACT

Time plays a role in virtually all accounts of causation, if only in the dictum that causes must precede effects. I have had very little to say about time so far, and the reason is that it does not appear to be necessary to use the concept explicitly in the MSC development. Recall that in Section 10 we saw how a notion of causation denoted — * might have a core of instances of sufficient causation, denoted T* , and that if ~r~* were cumulative and weakly transitive, then the MSC principle extended it to a CW causation on all of VHF. If the original causation were defined in terms of time, then the MSC extension would also incorporate time implicitly, even though this fact was not used in the extension process.